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Storytelling: An Exchange

Issue 222, Fall 2017

Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis met in the early nineties, when both were reporting for the New Republic. Since then, they have gone on to write some of the most popular nonfiction of our day—books that use personal stories to illustrate complex ideas in psychology, technology, sports, and economics. Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of five books, including The Tipping Point (2000) and David and Goliath (2013). Lewis is the author of fifteen books, including Liar’s Poker(1989), Moneyball (2003), The Blind Side (2006), and The Undoing Project (2016).

Some years ago, Gladwell agreed to interview Lewis for The Paris Review on the Art of Nonfiction. That interview never took place. Instead, the two had a series of public conversations, between 2013 and 2016, at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco; as a Live Talk at the Alex Theatre, in Glendale, California; and at the 92nd Street Y in New York. What follows—with our thanks to all three institutions—is a condensed and edited transcript of those conversations.

lewis

How did you get your start in magazines?

gladwell

By mistake, really. My senior year in college, I applied for a job at this disreputable right-wing magazine that I had never heard of, The American Spectator.

lewis

Were you yourself a disreputable right-winger?

gladwell

I was, briefly, only because every other opportunity for rebellion had been cut off. I couldn’t do drugs because there literally were no drugs in my high school. The rebels in my high school smoked cigarettes, and I was a runner—I couldn’t smoke cigarettes. At one point, I announced to my mother that my friend Terry and I were unhappy with the traditional metrics of success in high school grades and that we wanted to establish a system where you would multiply your grade by the number of days you were absent from school. I thought this was a very clever form of rebellion. So what does my mother do? She said, That’s a great idea, and the next time she ran into the principal at some town meeting, she said, [putting on a prim voice] I should tell you—my mother’s very polite—that Malcolm and his friend Terry probably won’t be attending school very diligently this term. Then she gave me a bunch of notes that said, Malcolm is to be excused from school today. And she left the date blank! I couldn’t win. So what was left? I read William F. Buckley and subscribed to National Review. I wrote away to the RNC and got a big poster of Ronald Reagan to put on my wall, next to the Cheryl Tiegs poster. Then I got to college and realized that, in a Canadian college, a Ronald Reagan poster on your dorm-room wall is a prophylactic—it guarantees that you will never have any kind of relations with a woman. So I very hastily abandoned my politics and sought more mainstream forms of rebellion.

lewis

And yet you found your way to TheAmerican Spectator.

gladwell

So I did. I was approaching the end of my senior year in college and I was jobless, and kind of panicked, when a friend of mine brought me a copy of The American Spectator with an ad in the back for an assistant managing editor. I wrote away to the ad, and they sent back a form that I had to fill out—an application, five pages, the last question of which was, Why do you want to work for The American Spectator? Now I had no idea, obviously—I had never read the magazine. So I just wrote one sentence, Doesn’t everyone want to work for The American Spectator? And I got the job! To my utter astonishment. So I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where it was based. It was quite a shock. There were these ads on late-night TV for a local gun shop, the owner was a guy named Bud something. He did the ads himself, and they consisted of him shooting various weapons at a target, over and over again. At the end, he turns to the camera and says, [in a Southern accent] I don’t want to make money, I just love to sell guns. And here I was, this sheltered Canadian boy from the hinterlands of the Bible Belt in Southern Ontario . . . I didn’t last long in that job. It took about six months for me to be fired.

lewis

How did you get the idea that you wanted to be a writer in the first place? I mean, why were you even applying for a job at a magazine?

gladwell

Well, I had a zine in high school and then in college with my two best friends—remember zines?—and the zine was called Ad Hominem: A Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion. The rule was you had to attack someone in every article. I had been reading William F. Buckley, you remember. We would run it off on the photo­copier and distribute it ourselves. Also, I did sportswriting for the college newspaper, but we had no sports in our college except for one vaguely intramural football team. No one went to the games—and when I say no one, I mean literally no one. So we just made everything up. We invented this coach named Wexford Harding. Wexford was from Alabama and had a drinking problem and spoke in “Southern” epigrams—we were reading Faulkner in our English class. The whole thing was preposterous. It didn’t occur to me, in college, that you could write as a job. I assumed I would go to law school or business school or something.

And once I got fired from The American Spectator, I was sure my time in journalism was over. I’d had my big chance to make it in America and had blown it. I put all of my belongings into my white Chevy Impala, and I drove from Indiana to Washington, D.C., because I knew someone in Washington, D.C., and felt I could sleep on her floor for a while. To this day, I remember tearfully driving through West Virginia in the middle of winter, and the song on the radio that was playing—because you’d go from one AM station to the other and you’d hear the same song all over again—was “I Want to Know What Love Is,” by Foreigner.

lewis

Oh God.

gladwell

And I remember, I devised in this teary trip a psychological questionnaire based on the song “I Want to Know What Love Is,” by taking every lyric and turning it into a question. Question number one, Do you want to know what love is? If so, do you want me to show you? Do you need a little time, you know, to think things over? In your life, is there heartache and pain? If so, do you think you can take it again? It’s not a bad questionnaire! It goes straight to the heart of who you are, right?

I haven’t thought about any of these things for such a long time.

lewis

You’re like a walking digression. So you get your questionnaire, you get to Washington. How did you start actually writing?

gladwell

I got a job with a right-wing think tank. I chose it because I went in and they had an L-shaped office. The entrance was at the top of the L, then there was the long spine of the L, then there was a short hallway with a small room at the very end of it. I realized the geography was such that no one would ever go to that room. I was interviewing for the job of doing their news­letter or something. I asked, Where will I work? And they said, In here. And a light bulb went off in my head—I will have complete privacy! They’re not even ­going to know whether I’m in the office. Remember my history in high school. It paid twelve thousand a year. That’s where I started to freelance.

But you know, I almost gave it up because—well, I was illegal, and eventually I got caught sneaking across the border. I would have my parents drive me, but one time I got caught on my way back from Jamaica. In any case, they were going to deport me, and I said to the guy at the border—this is pre-9/11—I have a doctor’s appointment in Washington, can we delay this for a couple of days? He said, Sure. So I go to Washington, I quit my job, sublet my apartment, give away all my belongings, and I go to the INS office to get deported. They make you wait, so two hours later this guy comes out, looks at me, rifles through these files, leaves, comes back, rifles through more files, leaves, comes back, and finally says, I don’t know who you are or what your name is or why you’re here—I’ve lost your file. So I went back and got my apartment and my job back. Ever since then, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for the inefficiencies of big government. That’s why I’m here. I would be a lawyer in Canada if my file had not been mislaid.

lewis

You just created in me the sensation I sometimes feel when I’m reading my own work—that you didn’t answer my question, but I don’t really care. So you can go on or we can go back to what I actually asked you.